With the advance of the Internet and information communication technologies, the contents industry is given much weight in our industries and occupies an important position in terms of quality. Also, because of the development of next-generation information technology (IT) environment, the contents related technologies become complex from a simple component technology and the related technologies tend to be integrated. That is, in the ultra high speed, high capacity, and wired/wireless integration environment, the contents have characteristics of user orientation, realization, portability, and copyright protection. There is a demand for development of new technology for generating/producing, storing/managing, protecting/distributing, and serving these contents.
Specifically, digital contents occupy about 80% (1 hex byte, 1018 bytes) of all contents generated every year and can be copied without loss of the contents. Therefore, when the digital contents are distributed over the Internet, the technology for managing the copyrights of the digital contents is urgently demanded.
Due to these demands, digital rights management (DRM) technology is widely used as the technology for protecting the copyrights of the digital contents. Specifically, PAT (persistent association technologies) is a technology to persistently combine digital contents and contents-related data (information) and it protects the copyrights of the contents by embedding or extracting the copyright information to or from the digital contents.
The PAT includes a watermarking, a fingerprinting, and so on. A PAT associated with digital video media is called a video PAT.
Depending on the objects, the PAT uses basic technologies of various fields, such as a signal processing, an image processing, a computer graphics, a communication, a computer science, a recognition science, and so on. According to the original objects, the PAT must secure robustness against intentional/unintentional damage, modification and removal of the embedded information.
At this point, a variety of damage, modification and removal with respect to the embedded information are called an attack to the embedded information. By manipulating digital contents to which content information is embedded, the embedded information signal is removed or made to be undetectable. Also, by making a fraud embedded information, the copyright and property right may not be claimed. These attacks are called a PAT attack.
Therefore, the development and design of the PAT require the checking of various attacks (e.g., damage, modification and removal of the embedded information) and the evaluation as to whether the embedded information efficiently operates with respect to various attacks.
A StirMark, a CertiMark, and a CheckMark are most widely used as PAT evaluating methods. Since these methods are an evaluation tool for still images, they are difficult to apply to video images.
The evaluation of the video PAT is performed in terms of a visibility evaluation, a robustness evaluation, and a capacity evaluation. For now, the method for evaluating the video PAT with respect to various attacks is not perfect. Also, since it is very difficult to satisfy all requirements of the evaluation, it is preferable that the video PAT should be evaluated according to the use cases and objects of the video PAT.
In addition, it is preferable that the evaluation and certification of the video PAT should be objectively achieved and the stability and mutual reliability of the evaluation result should be secured by repeating the evaluation procedures of various video PATs and testing several times the performance of video PAT products. For this purpose, it is efficient to automate the video PAT evaluation/certification procedures. Also, there is a demand for methods for allowing researchers and developers of laboratories, product developers of industries, and consumers to easily access the evaluation/certification engine of the certification authority through the Internet and to evaluate the video PAT.